The
Scottish Tradition in Canada
The Scot in the Fur TradeElaine Allan Mitchell

It would be almost impossible to overemphasize the
pre-eminent position which Scots of every stripe, Highlander, Lowlander
and Islander, attained during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in
the North American fur trade. The same political, economic and social
pressures which forced them as a people to emigrate in such large
numbers, brought them as a matter of course into this expanding trade.
But it is clear that, in addition to the paramount need to earn a
living, they possessed certain advantages of character or education, or
both, which admirably fitted them for the service of the two principal
and diverse interests in the northwest, the Canadians operating from
Montreal and the English on Hudson's Bay. If the dashing Highlanders of
the North West Company have captured the imagination of the general
public, still they must yield pride of place to the less spectacular
Orkneymen of the Hudson's Bay Company, who preceded them in that part of
North America formerly known as Rupert's Land. In later years, too, the
sons of both groups, the majority of them born of marriages with Indian
women, were frequently to succeed their fathers and grandfathers, and
themselves to play a substantial and worthy part in the continent-wide
and virtually monopolistic corporation on whose foundations the modern
Canadian nation has been built.

The fur trade dates back to the earliest days of the
discovery of Canada. The Basque, Breton and other European fishermen who
followed the explorers to the Gulf of St. Lawrence (and may even have
preceded them) were the first to barter furs from the Indians with goods
and trinkets, but the trade continued to be subsidiary to the fishing
industry and of minor importance until the hatmakers of Europe
discovered the superiority of beaver in the manufacture of their
increasingly popular felt hats. The hooked ends of the under fur
particularly suited it to the felting process and the most prized pelts
came from the robes which the Indians wore to Protect themselves from
the cold. These skins, taken when prime during he winter, were subjected
to a special treatment which caused the guard hairs to fall out, leaving
the soft fur underneath, while constant wear for fifteen to eighteen
months further improved the quality, making them well-greased, pliable
and yellow in colour.1

The new French colony, which Champlain founded on the
St. Lawrence River in 1608, soon came to rely on the fur trade as its
principal source of revenue and the adventurous coureurs de bois,
preferring the free life of the woods, with its relatively high rewards,
to the harsh and unremunerative toil of Quebec farms, spread out in all
directions by way of the Ottawa River and the Great Lakes in pursuit of
beaver. The story of Radisson and Groseilliers and the founding of the
Hudson's Bay Company is too well known to be repeated here, but the
presence of English traders after 1668 on the bay which the French
regarded as their own had immediate repercussions on the St. Lawrence.
Not only did it give fresh impetus to the French movement inland, in
order to intercept the furs going down to the Bay, but it led to
numerous attempts, first by sea and then by land, to oust the English
from their posts. These campaigns featured the daring exploits of de
Troyes and Iberville and constitute one of the most exciting periods in
the history of New France.

In 1713 the Treaty of Utrecht ended the struggle for
the Bay by returning all the posts there to the English, and a glut of
beaver in Europe gave temporary pause to the pace of French expansion in
the interior. A few years later, however, it was again taken up by
explorers like La Verendrye and his sons, who continued to press inland
towards the Rocky Mountains and to establish posts in strategic places
along their route.

Meanwhile the Hudson's Bay Company, emerging from a
quarter of a century's precarious tenure of the Bay, was experiencing
acute personnel problems. Its officers, as Professor Rich has pointed
out in his history of the Company,2 were typical products of the English artisan class at the
beginning of the eighteenth century, mostly promoted servants not bred
to command. They proved unable to control obstreperous subordinates
largely drawn from the slums of towns (principally London and its
environs) and much given to excessive brandy-drinking and promiscuous
Indian women. Restricting their access to these vices, the governor and
the London Committee recognized, was no permanent solution and they
began to look round for more biddable labourers. They had already tried
the Scottish mainland (two presumably Scottish servants, James Mudie and
Thomas Bannatine, signed the protest against Henry Sergeant's surrender
of Fort Albany to de Troyes in 16863), but the distances
involved and perhaps English distrust of the latent Jacobitism4
of the Highlanders had led them to give over their interest in Scots.
Prospects for recruitment in the Orkneys, however, now seemed promising.
The Company's ships frequently made Stromness their last port of call
before sailing for Hudson's Bay and the islanders' hardihood, docility
and diligence, as well as their obvious poverty, were likely to make
them good servants.

Even today, despite centuries of patriotic adherence
to the rest of Scotland, Orcadians (their proper connotation, although
the Hudson's Bay records invariably refer to them as Orkneymen) are
inclined to regard themselves as a separate people. And in a manner of
speaking they are, for the Norse invasions obliterated every trace of
the Celtic peoples who formerly inhabited the island. Until 1468, when
they came under the Scottish crown, they were part of the Kingdom of
Norway, although their hereditary earls had belonged to Scottish
families for over two hundred years and Scottish influence had also come
in through many of their bishops. The change of rulers was not a happy
one for the islanders. Their ancient landholding system gradually
disappeared as Scots became the largest proprietors, with little
interest in their tenants' welfare. By the middle of the seventeenth
century agriculture was backward, fishing on a commercial scale unknown
and education only for the few, while the ordinary crofter was generally
both impoverished and miserable. "Considering the oppression they had
had to suffer, and the penalties and humiliation they had endured,"
The New Orkney Book observes, "the wonder is that they had any
spirit left in them."5

Stromness harbour provides a splendid anchorage for
ships and in the eighteenth century captains bound for North America
used it to avoid privateers and French cruisers in the English Channel.
During the Napoleonic Wars fleets of merchantmen assembled there to be
taken in convoy by the Royal Navy, while whalers and sealers on their
way to Greenland found it a convenient rendezvous for completing their
crews. For the Hudson's Bay ships, the route by Stromness afforded a
direct passage to Hudson Strait, allowing their captains more time in
port to replenish stores and enjoy themselves, but the advantages of
securing servants there probably outweighed all other considerations.

The London Committee wanted sober, industrious,
dependable, strong and healthy young men, and the Orkneymen filled the
bill. Bred as crofters and fishermen, handy both ashore and at sea,
accustomed to cold and hunger, loyal, obedient and hard-working, they
became the backbone of the Company's overseas operations, as essential
to its prosperity as the French-Canadian voyageurs to the Montreal
traders. In turn, they benefited from service with the Company. Small as
their wages were, they could spend little money in the wilderness and,
being extremely parsimonious, they often accumulated enough in a few
years to retire, buy a small croft and settle down, to the envy of their
neighbours. At a later date, after the Red River Settlement was founded
on the present site of the City of Winnipeg, many of them remained in
the country with their Indian wives and children, frequently to enjoy a
more prosperous way of life than if they had returned home.

Naturally the Orkneymen were not without defects of
character, although these were apparently of little consequence until
the Hudson's Bay Company came up against the Canadians in the interior
during the sec-ondhalf of the eighteenth
century. Those with ability rose to the most important positions in the
country as traders and officers but, with some notable exceptions, they
were generally less enterprising and aggressive thantheir Canadian opponents. The common servants, on the other hand,
showed less steadiness and reliability and, compared to
their French counterparts, were overly cautious, deficient in energy and
unwilling to stand up for themselves or their employers. Often dour and
stubborn, they also lacked the French ability, or desire, to make
themselves agreeable to the Indians. As individuals, they were usually
docile but in numbers they were inclined to combine against authority
and their clannish attachment to one another sometimes made governing
them difficult. Despite his recognition of their virtues and their
suitability for the country, Samuel Hearne, the Hudson's Bay officer who
explored the Coppermine River, called them ''the slyest set of men under
the sun.''6

The Hudson's Bay Company seems to have recruited
Orkneymen as early as 1708. In January of that year, after consulting
their captains, the governor and committee wrote to a "Mr Grimsay at the
Orkneys," instructing him to hire twelve or fourteen servants, lusty
young men between the ages of twenty and thirty of whom two were to be
tailors.7 Isaac Cowie, a clerk in the Company's
service from 1867-74 and himself a Shetlander, asserts that although the
London Committee sent special agents four years later to engage another
forty men, it was not until 1740 that the Hudson's Bay ships regularly
called at Stromness.8 He gives no authority for his
statement, however. Certainly the captains and outgoing officers,
working through local contacts, played an important part in recruitment
for many years, until the Company finally employed an agent at Stromness,
paying him a commission on each recruit. The necessity for doing so was
probably the result of the much larger numbers being hired. The New
Orkney Book states that between 1700 and 1800, an average of seventy
were enlisted yearly for a considerable period and that by 1799, of the
Company's 530 men in North America, almost four out of five were
Orkneymen.9

A carpenter recruit of 1876, N.M.W.J. McKenzie, who
rose to become general manager of all the Company's eastern districts,
has described the annual arrival of the Hudson's Bay ships as one of the
two memorable events of the year in Stromness, the other being the
Lammas market.10 During their stay, he relates, the captains
and Company officers held high carnival, with dinner parties on board
and ashore and dancing every night. At least one matrimonial match was
made during those halycon days in 1848, when the agent's daughter, Anne
Rose Clouston, became engaged to Edward Pelly, a clerk in the service
and a cousin of the governor, Sir John Pelly. She followed him to York
Factory on Hudson's Bay in 1849, in the care of the new Church of
England bishop, who married them there. Anne Rose may have been the
first girl to come from the Old Country to be married at York, for the
officers usually married when on leave or chose their wives in the
country. Letitia Hargrave, wife of the chief factor at York, remarked
caustically in a letter to her family in Scotland that the bride had
"brought an immense quantity of finery 5 perfectly new bonnets besides
that she wore on board, & scarves, handkerchiefs & shawls as if she had
been going to Calcutta, & napery, blankets & all from her Father and
Mother. They have not much money & I am sure will feel the effects of
such disbursement for many a day."11

About 1810, when the need for more aggressive
servants to oppose the North West Company became imperative, the
Hudson's Bay Company engaged young men from other parts of Scotland as
well, principally the Highlands, Lewis and Shetland, assembling them at
Stromness for embarkation. The ships usually came direct from Gravesend
on the Thames and remained for a couple of weeks. When N.M.W.J. McKenzie
joined the Company in 1876, the candidates, variously classified as
clerks, carpenters, boat builders, blacksmiths, coopers, tinsmiths,
sloopers and labourers, had to be between the ages of eighteen and
twenty-five and pass a rigid medical examination before being accepted.
At other periods, however, and especially during the Napoleonic Wars,
when young men were scarce everywhere, the Company could not afford to
be so choosy and many were the complaints from the country of the
quality of recruits being sent out. As more men became available in
Rupert's Land and Canada during the latter half of the nineteenth
century, recruitment of Orkneymen diminished but was not finally
discontinued until 1891, when the Company's ships ceased to call at
Stromness.

Among Orkneymen who rose to prominence in the
Hudson's Bay Company prior to its coalition with the North West Company
in 1821 were Alexander Kennedy, Joseph Isbister and William Sinclair
(the latter said to be descended from the old earls of Orkney). Another
Orkneyman, William Tomison, the Company's dominant figure on the
Saskatchewan for twenty years, is also remembered for his courage in
caring for the Indians during the terrible smallpox epidemic of 1781-2.
About 1826 the Company's agent in Orkney was John Rae, father of the
famous Arctic explorer, Dr. John Rae, of whom we shall be hearing more
later. Edward Clouston, a lawyer, took on the post in 1836, retaining it
for almost thirty years. Gentle and kindly, he was affectionately
remembered by many of the young men who passed through his hands. His
two sons, Robert and James Stewart Clouston, became clerks in the
service, Robert rising to the rank of chief trader before his premature
death and James to that of chief factor. Both married into the Company's
hierarchy. Robert's wife was Jessy Ross, daughter of Chief Factor Donald
Ross of Norway House, and James's, Margaret Miles, whose father, Chief
Factor Robert Miles, was his chief at Moose Factory. Jessy Clouston died
from tuberculosis after a year of marriage and is buried in Playgreen
cemetery at Norway House. James's eldest son, Edward Seaborn Clouston,
had a distinguished career in Canada. Entering the Bank of Montreal at
the age of sixteen, he became successively general manager and
vice-president. He was honoured with a baronetcy in 1908.

It was only after 1763 that other Scots, Highlanders
in particular, but Lowlanders too, began to play an increasingly
influential part in the Canadian fur trade. As in the Orkneys, the
principal spur for emigration was poverty. But in the case of the
Highlanders, the poverty was not only more immediate and
acute but intensified by political and religious persecution and social
decay. The erosion of the power of their chieftains and of the old
system of land tenure, which culminated in the defeat of the clans at
Culloden in 1745, left many young Highlanders with no prospects for the
future and still others no choice but exile. North America received the
larger share of this emigration. The West Indian islands offered vast
sugar plantations and a thriving foreign trade, while in Canada, once
the French had withdrawn from the northwest, the most rapidly expanding
and profitable field for exploitation was the fur trade.

Beyond all these considerations, however, Scots,
generally speaking, seem to have had a natural affinity for the trade.
In the first place, partly no doubt as a result of early political and
commercial ties with France, as well as a shared dislike (or envy) of
the English, they got along well with the French in Canada, without
whose help the Canadian trade could never have been revived so soon. It
appears moreover that the Highlanders at least (perhaps because of the
intricacies of their own Gaelic) possessed an innate linguistic ability,
which enabled them to acquire quickly a fluency in French and in the
Indian tongues of the districts to which they were posted. Isaac Cowie
noticed this facility in 1867, remarking that the newly engaged
Highlanders in his group were picking up both languages much more
readily than their companions.12

Cowie observed, too, that the Highlanders were
generally livelier and more active than the others, besides adapting
themselves more rapidly to a new and alien environment. Their native
climate, which could be harsh at times, probably fitted them better for
a country with a decided winter, while their own hills were rugged
enough to predispose them to a liking for the Rockies. With lands at
home only partly suitable for cultivation and even when arable worked
with difficulty, they were more inclined to accept the hardships of the
northwest and to be less intimidated by its overpowering physical
characteristics than men used to gentler and lusher landscapes.

Aggressive, enterprising, courageous, ambitious,
determined and shrewd, the Scottish recruits were finally, because of
their common school system, better educated on the whole than their
English counterparts of the day. One must not, of course, rate them too
highly. Other nationalities share these desirable traits and undoubtedly
Scottish clannishness, as we shall see, played a major role in their
eventually overwhelming predominance in the Montreal trade. But when
every tendency to exaggerate is discounted, a sufficient core of truth
remains to sustain our argument that the Scot fitted naturally into the
fur trade world.

Like the Orkneymen, needless to say, the Highlanders
exhibited the defects of their virtues. If they were lively and quick,
their tempers were equally so; with generations of clan wars behind
them, they were apt to be quarrelsome, while their daring frequently led
them into untenable positions. Excessively proud and often conceited,
they were as easily offended and, when their numbers gave them
superiority, sometimes hard to handle. At their best, however, they made
loyal, capable, brave and intelligent officers and servants.

Some of the Scots who came to Canada at the close of
the Seven Years' War to pursue the fur trade were, like Simon McTavish,
already engaged in the Albany trade and merely moved north to be closer
to the centre of activity. Others, like Richard Dobie and his associate,
William Grant of Three Rivers, came directly from the Old Country. They
represented all classes and degrees. Dobie, a Lowlander from the
neighbourhood of Edinburgh, had a sister married to a poor Gilmerton
weaver and presumably came from the same milieu. Grant's father farmed a
small Highland holding, Inverlochy, in Strathavon, upper Banffshire, but
William's uncles, John and Francis Grant, owned large plantations in
Jamaica and John was Chief Justice of the island from 1783-90. When he
retired, John bought Kilgraston, a Perthshire estate, to which his
brother succeeded in 1793. Other Grants in the fur trade were so
numerous and their relationships so confusing that so far no one has
been able to sort them out.

The sons of Scots settled in the English colonies
before the Revolutionary War, and who later came to Canada as United
Empire Loyalists, also figured largely in the Montreal trade. One of
them was the famous Nor-'Wester, Simon Fraser, explorer of the
tempestuous river which bears his name, who was born in Bennington, New
York, in 1776. Still others were the sons and grandsons of men attached
to the Highland regiments disbanded after the Seven Years' War and again
after the American Revolution, the best known being the 78th, or Fraser
Highlanders, who settled about Murray Bay, Quebec, and the Glengarry
Highlanders, who made homes for themselves in what is now Glengarry
County, Ontario.

From the height of their own royally-chartered and
century-old company the Hudson's Bay men referred to the early Canadian
traders as "pedlars." Although intended as a term of opprobrium, that,
in essence, was what they were - daring, resourceful and adventurous
individuals, risking their own or borrowed capital, to say nothing of
their lives, in an attempt to make their fortunes. Some of the earliest
of them exploited fields relatively close to Montreal, Richard Dobie,
for example, turning his attention to Timiskaming in 1764. William Grant
of Three Rivers traded at Michilimackinac and in the Illinois country,
while the Montreal firms of Todd, McGill & Co. and Forsyth, Richardson &
Co. not only had extensive interests southwest of the Great Lakes but
also secured a hold on Nipigon. James McGill, Thomas and John Forsyth,
and John Richardson were all Scottish-born. Isaac Todd's birthplace is
not known and he retired in England, but he was an active member of St.
Gabriel's Presbyterian Church in Montreal and presumably also a Scot.

The first trader on the Saskatchewan after 1763
appears to have been a Frenchman previously engaged in that trade, known
as "Franceway" (Francois). He wintered there in 1765 or 1766, probably
outfitted by Isaac Todd and James McGill. James Finlay, Sr., a Scot
trading on his own account, followed him in 1768. Another Scottish
trader, Thomas Corry, spent the winters of 1771-2 and 1772-3 on the
Saskatchewan and a measure of the profits to be made in those early days
may be judged from the fact that he accumulated sufficient capital in
the two seasons to allow him to retire from the trade.13 But although two Scots were thus apparently the first to follow a
Frenchman to the northwest, French, Swiss, English, Irish and American
traders were all soon to be found there.

Almost from the beginning, because of the high
capital risk and the extended credit necessary for trading over such
great distances, individual "pedlars" tended to combine forces. At first
these unions were temporary, usually made for one year only and
sometimes ending unhappily. Indeed it was hostilities among the various
factions, climaxed by a murder in the interior, which led to the
formation in 1783 of the first association of traders known as the North
West Company. This amalgamation was primarily the work of Simon McTavish
who, with the Frobisher brothers, Benjamin and Joseph, held six of the
sixteen shares in the concern. The Frobishers were Yorkshiremen, the
only two Englishmen among the original partners, while of the remaining
seven, McTavish and three others were Scots, with one Irishman, one
Frenchman and one American comprising the rest.

The infant North West Company was strongly opposed by
another influential Montreal firm, Gregory, McLeod & Co., which had been
left out of the new arrangement. One of its founders in 1773 had been
James Finlay, Sr., who retired ten years later and was replaced by
Normand McLeod, a Detroit trader born in Skye. Young Alexander Mackenzie
entered its service about 1779, to be followed by his cousin, Roderick,
in 1784. The increasing bitterness between the rivals in the northwest
culminated during the winter of 1786-7 with the murder in Athabasca of
John Ross, a partner of Gregory, McLeod & Co. Roderick Mackenzie and
Simon McTavish's nephew, William McGillivray, brought the news down to
the central depot at Grand Portage in the summer of 1787 and their
respective principals, fearing that Ross's death would lead to
reprisals, immediately decided to unite their interests under the name
of the North West Company. Shortly afterwards the newly formed firm of
McTavish, Frobisher & Co., whose partners, Simon McTavish and Joseph
Frobisher, held the dominant interest in the North West Company, became
its Montreal agents.

Meanwhile, in their turn, the English on Hudson's Bay
had been pushing inland. Apparently the opposition of French traders in
the interior had never been serious enough to force them to alter their
original mode of conducting their trade and for some years after 1763
they had continued to maintain large, impressive and well-stocked
factories on the sea-coast and to wait for the Indians to bring down
their furs. But it was not long before it became clear that, with active
Canadian traders swarming inland and intercepting their customers, they
must try a new approach. Accordingly, in 1774 they built Cumberland
House on the Saskatchewan and quickly established other posts in the
interior to enable them to meet the Indians on their own lands. It was
now that the disadvantages of a long residence on the Bay, as well as
the drawbacks of their Orkney servants, became glaringly evident and
their situation was even more serious, of course, when the independent
Canadian traders combined to form the North West Company.

To begin with, there was the vexing problem of
transporting goods and servants inland. On the larger rivers, where
boats could be used, the Ork-neymen fared well enough, being accustomed
to handling them from childhood. Indeed the development of the famed
York boat, which was to be the Company's standby in the northwest until
modern transportation reached the area, was directly due to Orkney
knowledge and skill. Unfortunately, most of the rivers on the Laurentian
Shield, which forms a vast collar about the Bay, were not only tortuous,
but shallow during most of the summer and broken by falls. On them only
canoes would answer.

The English suffered from grave disadvantages even in
the matter of obtaining canoes. There was no suitable birch bark within
a considerable distance of Hudson's Bay and they had therefore to depend
largely on the inland Indians to supply them. But many of these Indians
were strongly attached to the Canadian traders, or afraid of offending
them, and when it suited their purpose, the Canadians did not scruple to
pre-empt canoes which the English had ordered or, if necessary, take
them from the Indians by force. Since the Orkney servants were
unfamiliar with such unsteady craft, the Hudson's Bay Company had to
rely for crews on its homeguard Indians (those about the Bay) and run
the risk of having them "enticed" by the Canadians in the interior. Even
if a few Orkneymen did become accustomed to handling canoes during the
period of their contracts, they often left the country for good at their
expiry, to be replaced by inexperienced hands. Moreover, hardy though
they were and patient under hardships, the Orkneymen were slow in
acquiring wilderness skills, many of them being intimidated by the
prospect of living and travelling in the forests of the Shield. Worse
still, they were neither as active nor as aggressive in the pursuit of
furs as were the Canadian traders and their French and Scottish
servants. All these handicaps took years to overcome and even up to the
time of the union in 1821, as several Hudson's Bay officers frankly
admitted, their own men rarely attained the standard of their opponents.

In these circumstances, the London Committee
recommended hiring Canadians, who would not only be useful themselves
but serve as examples and teachers for the Orkneymen. The officers in
the interior did manage to entice a few from the opposition but this
solution (again with some exceptions) proved unsatisfactory. Few
Canadians would accept the salaries offered, and those who did
frequently turned out to be not only untrustworthy but undisciplined,
perhaps the most heinous of sins in a semi-militaristic organization
like the Hudson's Bay Company. As N.M.W.J. McKenzie was later to remark
of his chief factor at Fort Ellice, Archibald MacDonald,
"you might break all the ten commandments in one clatter, but to break
any of the rules and regulations of the service, that was quite another
thing."14 On the whole, it would seem, deserters on
both sides generally tended to be misfits or malcontents, unlikely to
make good servants for either company.

During these same years changes were also taking
place in the Canadian trade, and in the process the French in the
country were losing out to the Scots. The partners of the various
interested firms were bringing in needy, or deserving, relatives and
friends as apprentice clerks and these newcomers were gradually
replacing the French masters inland. It was not always, however, a case
of nepotism or greed. Often the French servants or clerks, like Panneton,
master of Fort Abitibi until 1776, were men of little or no education.
Although they had grown up in the country and were at home with the
Indians, they were probably not the organized and efficient managers
which an increasingly complex and competitive trade was coming to need.
Where the French were qualified, they appear to have held their own, but
when they retired, as they were more and more often replaced by Scots,
the general trend was unmistakable.

Even when there were no relatives or friends to
consider, the North West Company apparently favoured Scottish clerks and
servants. In October, 1798, McTavish, Frobisher & Co. requested Aneas
Cameron of Fort Timiskaming, who was returning to Scotland on leave, to
engage "four or five decent young men from the Age of 18 upwards, of
good character & Sufficient Education as Apprentices or Clerks to the
Concern, for 5. 6. or 7 years" on very favourable terms indeed. The
agents also directed Cameron to write to a gentleman in the Orkneys, who
was known to them, and to assist him in getting any servants he might be
able to hire for them to Greenock. Should the gentleman fail to secure
any, the agents added, Cameron himself should search out and engage an
equal number of seamen from any other part of Scotland, as well as two
or three good ship's carpenters, able to navigate the Company's small
vessels on the Great Lakes and willing to double as seamen. To the
latter he might offer from £50 to £ 100 a year, provided they had
sufficient education to keep their cargo accounts.15

It is surprising to find the Nor'Westers looking to
the Orkneys for servants, but we must remember that these were the days
of the Napoleonic Wars, when labour was so scarce in Canada and Europe
as to be at times virtually unobtainable. Whether they ever tried again
is not disclosed, but certainly the practice of hiring Highlanders
continued until eventually, in Dr. Wallace's words, their predominance
in the Canadian trade made "the names of the North West Company partners
sound like a roll-call of the clans at Culloden."16 It also
presumably helped to account for the "much-changed" Montreal, which the
retired Alexander Henry the Elder, one of the early "pedlars" and
himself of English descent, found so incongenial. "The country is over
run with Scotchmen," he wrote disparagingly.17

Despite the distressing effects of the war in Europe,
which rapidly inflated the cost of goods and salaries and at first
depressed the price of furs, the years from 1787 to 1798 were probably
the most prosperous and peaceful for the Nor'Westers. Fur prices
gradually recovered and the Hudson's Bay Company, though a palpable
threat, was not yet affecting their profits. Besides, any progress the
English achieved in the interior was counterbalanced by their own
expansion in Athabasca and by Alexander Mackenzie's journeys to the
Arctic and Pacific Oceans, which opened up vast new possibilities for
trade. Although the opposition of independent Montreal traders still
troubled them, like the partnership of David and Peter Grant from
1793-5, it was short-lived. By 1795, when the Nor-'Westers signed a new
agreement to come into force in 1799, Simon McTavish's ambition to unite
all the Canadian trade under the aegis of his own firm seemed close to
becoming a reality.

But it was not to be. The subsequent defection from
the agreement of the two influential firms of Todd, McGill & Co., and
Forsyth, Richardson & Co., opposition to the agents both within and
outside the North West Company, and the jealous enmity towards McTavish
of men like Daniel Sutherland and Angus Shaw, was to shatter the dream.
At Grand Portage in the summer of 1799 Alexander Mackenzie, who had been
a partner of McTavish, Frobisher & Co. since 1795, announced his
intention of withdrawing from that concern at the same time that
Forsyth, Richardson & Co. and several other interests were launching an
opposition in force against the North West Company. The new association
was known as the XY Company from the markings on its bales (the letters
X and Y following W in the alphabet) and after
1800, when Mackenzie joined its ranks, as the New North West Company.

Some have ascribed the disastrous rivalry which
followed to the uncompromising individualism and divisiveness of the
Scots on both sides and there is reason in their arguments. The obdurate
Highland pride of the principals, McTavish and Mackenzie, was
intensified by the personal rift which had opened between them. The
latest evidence indicates that Mackenzie, the younger and apparently the
more intransigeant, his influence in the Company bolstered by his feats
of exploration, may have been more to blame for the quarrel.18
On the other hand, it is clear that he considered himself greatly
injured by McTavish and his nephews, William and Duncan McGillivray, so
much so, he wrote to Aneas Cameron in the spring of 1800, that he might
for a time forget his former fur trade friends even forget that which we
seldom Lose Sight of, my Interests."19 Pride can go no
further.

Only the currently high prices for furs, as Richard
Dobie pointed out in a letter to Cameron, allowed the two factions to
indulge in such foolishness. Dobie had heard that McTavish and the
McGillivrays had sworn to sacrifice £200,000 to be revenged of all
opposition, and his grandson-in-law, James Finlay, Jr., a North West
wintering partner, had told him that although the Nor'Westers did not
expect to get a sixpence of profit during the seven years
of the new agreement, still they reconciled themselves "with totally
Ruin to Oppossers." "Mutuality woud anser better," Dobie concluded drily.
But the Scots, after all, are not the only uncompromising
controversialists and, given human nature in general and the lure of
high profits, perhaps the battle between the Canadian fur interests for
what they considered a fair share in the riches of the northwest would
have been inevitable, whatever the racial derivation of the
protagonists.

The opposition between the two Canadian companies
continued until 1804, when McTavish's death cleared the way for a union
between them. By then it must have been apparent to all that to continue
as they were doing would mean ultimate ruin for both parties, and indeed
it now seems likely that the financial losses which the Canadians
suffered during these bitter years were a significant factor in their
eventual defeat at the hands of the Hudson's Bay Company.20 For the time being, however, with the reunited Montreal interests
free to devote all their energies to overcoming their remaining rival,
the situation of the English company was to become so critical that
again, as a century before, years were to pass without any dividends
being paid to its shareholders.

Nevertheless the Hudson's Bay Company, with its
advantages of a shorter and cheaper supply route through Hudson's Bay
and its capital reserve fund, survived the crisis by instituting a rigid
system of retrenchment, by adopting some of the better features of the
North West Company's organization, and by renewing its pressure against
the Canadians in the interior. After 1813, moreover, as its fortunes
began to improve, those of the Canadians took a downward turn with the
twin misfortunes of war with the United States and the intrusion into
the northwest of Lord Selkirk's Red River Settlement. The war seriously
interfered with the Nor-'Westers' main transport route by way of the
Great Lakes and hampered the trade in other ways, while the clash
between the colony and the North West Company was in the end to ruin the
Montreal trade.

It is in the tradition of tragic irony that the final
defeat of the North West Company should have been precipitated by
another Scot, Thomas Douglas, Earl of Selkirk. In 1812, with the support
of the Hudson's Bay Committee, he founded a colony at the forks of the
Red and Assiniboine Rivers for poor Scottish crofters displaced by the
Highland clearances. It was in the heart of the Nor'Westers' pemmican
country; this easily portable and highly nutritious food, compounded of
dried and pounded buffalo meat mixed with grease and berries, was the
mainstay of diet for all their brigades in the interior. When Selkirk's
governor, Miles Macdonell, forbade the export of pemmican from the
settlement, his action confirmed the Canadians' belief that the colony
was part of a new and dangerous threat to their trade and they
recklessly embarked on a course of intimidation which ended in 1816 in
the notorious massacre of Seven Oaks.21

These years witnessed the crumbling of the North West
Company under extreme pressure, its assets rapidly dwindling, a number
of its wintering partners at odds with the Montreal agents and its trade
in the northwest dislocated. Hoping to conclude a working arrangement
with the Hudson's Bay Committee, William and Simon McGillivray were in
London in 1820, when two of the dissident wintering partners, John
McLoughlin and Angus Bethune, arrived to negotiate a settlement on
behalf of themselves and their supporters. The British government was
drawn into the affair because of the virtual state of war in the
northwest, and the result of the negotiations was a coalition of the two
opposing fur trade interests which was, in fact, a defeat for the North
West Company.

Critics of the Nor'Westers have frequently imputed to
the overweening pride and arrogance of its Highlanders, and the excesses
to which they led, a large share in the retribution which overtook them.
Washington Irving, with his partiality for Astor and the Americans,
condemned "the swelling and braggart style" of these "Hyperborean
Nabobs"22 and could charge with considerable truth that the
wintering partners, many of them of good Scottish families, with a score
of retainers at their bidding, fancied themselves in the role of
Highland chieftains. He equally decried the convivial fraternity of the
Beaver Club in Montreal, and the extravagant frolic and feasting of the
summer gatherings at Fort William which, he claimed, communicated even
to the lowliest of employees a dangerous sense of solidarity and
superiority.

Their most partisan admirers do not deny these
Highlanders' faults but the spell of their tremendous achievements
remains undimmed, and even Irving could not resist it. The very phrase
he coined to describe them, "the lords of the lakes and the forests," is
likely to outlast the memory of their failings. The Hudson's Bay
Company's victory over the Nor'Westers was the classic one of the
tortoise over the hare, of the sober and canny over the gambler and
adventurer, of the staid and durable chartered company over the loose
partnership of individualists, with its inherent tendency towards
disruption. Nevertheless the day would come when the English company, in
its turn, would have to give way to pressures set in train by these same
Nor'Westers who, in building Canada's first great industry based on the
exploits of the French before them, laid secure foundations for the
modern Canadian nation.23 In that sense, at least, although
it would probably have been cold comfort at the time, their defeat was
not as final as it appeared to bein
1821.

The union of the two companies changed many things in
the northwest, but the predominance of Scots in the fur trade was not
one of them. George (later Sir George) Simpson, the Hudson's Bay chief
in Athabasca during 1820-1, soon rose to be overseas governor of all the
Company's territories, and his rule spanned the years of its greatest
power and prosperity, lasting until his death in 1860. Although more
gifted than most, Simpson was typical of those energetic, shrewd and
ambitious Scots with a genius for organization, economy and hard work,
who have built empires and made names and fortunes for
themselves all over the world. In contrast, his closest friend in the
country, John George McTavish, a former Nor'Wester, whose advice helped
him to salvage the best features of the Canadian company for the united
concern, represented the high-spirited and intelligent but easy-going
and extravagant Highlander, whose day in the northwest was almost over.
For in the Rupert's Land of Simpson's day, men of his own type were
increasingly to prevail, if only because his decisive and far-reaching
control of affairs left little room for individualists.

In the early years of his governorship, Simpson was
concerned with the problem of redundant servants left over from the
years of competition. Dissatisfied with many of the Canadian halfbreeds,
both former Nor-'Westers and those who had been recruited in Montreal
for the Hudson's Bay Company, he favoured Orkney servants and "European"
clerks, particularly for those districts bordering on the settled areas
of Canada. The Canadians in the service, he argued, prided themselves on
their knowledge of the country and their friendship with the Indians and
were fully aware of their value to any opposition. This situation tended
to make difficulties for the Company, not only in terms of employment
and wages but also in the very real danger that they might leave the
service and set up in the trade on their own or with others. If they
were moved inland, or to the Bayside districts, and were replaced with
"Europeans," all these drawbacks could be overcome. But Simpson had in
fact an even more compelling reason for preferring "European" servants
and clerks. The fewer the Canadians in the service, he was convinced,
the less other Canadians would know about the Company's business.

Most of his officers on the frontier (largely former
Nor'Westers) disagreed with him, objecting that Orkneymen were fit
neither for voyaging nor for going after Indians, but Simpson was not to
be deterred. Although conceding that they were seldom of much use during
their first season, he continued to advocate them on the ground that
they were steady and well-conducted. His preference for Orkneymen,
however, did not preclude Highlanders and here he and his officers, many
of them Highlanders themselves, found common ground. "Do not lose sight
of our Sturdy Glenlivat men," he adjured Chief Factor Angus Cameron of
Timiskaming in November, 1839, when that gentleman was home on leave,
"and let three or Four of them be such as may look forward to the rank
of Postmasters in due time. Stout strong active intelligent men who will
not be above putting their hands to anything." Yet a decade later,
outraged by the behaviour of two highly recommended men, Simpson had
harsh words even for Highlanders. As a class, he declared indignantly,
they had become "so uppish, self-sufficient, & selfish that I must say
my countrymen do not now stand quite so high in my estimation as
formerly."

For apprentice clerks, Simpson preferred young Scots
with a reasonable degree of education, a view obviously shared by Chief
Factor Alexander Christie, a Scot who had joined the Hudson's Bay
Company in 1809.

"Without any partiality to my Countrymen," Christie
wrote to Cameron in 1826, "really in my humble opinion they will ever be
found the most proper persons for this Country. I mean respectable
Farmers sons who have received a plain education, and who's morals have
not been neglected, having no prospects but what may be derived from
perseverance and industry, - give me such for Indian traders in
preference to any Dandy from behind a counter, or from the desk of a
Counting house."

Following the earlier custom of both companies,
Simpson and the London Committee were always ready to engage the sons of
officers and servants in good standing, either active or retired, and as
the quality of Orkneymen willing to emigrate fell off during the
nineteenth century, they came to depend more and more on this pool of
labour. The original Orkneymen had intermarried with the Crees,
particularly the Swampies who lived about the Bay, a steady, reliable
people of considerable character. The Orkney strain blended well with
the Cree and the daughters of the first marriages, in turn, became wives
of the newcomers to the country.24 After the Red River
Settlement was founded, many of these men chose to retire there with
their families. In some instances, the succession in the service went
from father, to son, to grandson, a circumstance which further
strengthened the esprit de corps of a company remarkable for that
quality. Alexander Christie, twice Governor of Assiniboia, who
eventually took his "country" wife to settle in Edinburgh, was one of
those whose sons and grandsons followed him into the service and
achieved distinction there.

Another kind of Scottish succession was exemplified
in the rich Timiskaming district where "a dynasty of Camerons"25
followed one another over a period of almost a hundred years. The
Camerons came from upper Banffshire (Strathavon and Glenlivet), and the
first of them, Aeneas Cameron (a cousin of William Grant of Three Rivers
and like him a nephew of Chief Justice John Grant of Jamaica), went to
Fort Abitibi in 1788 as a clerk for Dobie & Grant, the Montreal firm
which then owned the Timiskaming posts. After some years there and at
Grand Lac he assumed command of Fort Timiskaming in 1793, two years
before the North West Company bought the posts. He became a partner in
the North West Company in 1798 and remained at Fort Timiskaming until
1804. By that time his nephew, Angus Cameron, was serving at
Matawagamingue, one of Fort Timiskaming's subsidiary posts, having come
out to Canada in the spring of 1801. On his uncle's retirement Angus
became master of Matawagamingue (Mattagarni) and in 1816a partner in the North West Company and head of the Timiskaming
district. With the exception of seven years from 1827-34, which he spent
at Lake of Two Mountains, Angus Cameron remained in charge of the
Timiskaming district until he retired in 1843, having become a chief
factor in 1837. He brought out two others of his family who eventually
succeeded to the command of the district, his nephew James Cameron, who
began his career in Timiskaming in 1836 and was in charge of the fort
from 1847 until his untimely death in 1851, and a cousin, Charles
Stuart, who served in the district from 1840-72, during the last four
years of which he, too, commanded Fort Timiskaming. It is indeed a
remarkable record.

George Bryce, an early historian of the Hudson's Bay
Company, asserts that from 1821 to 1870, the year in which the Company's
territories became part of the new Dominion of Canada, 171 out of a
total of 263 commissioned officers, or 63%, were Scottish in origin, a
situation which he credited entirely to Simpson's recruitment policy.
Whether his figures are reliable or not, it seems safe to say that the
Company's personnel during most of the nineteenth century were
predominantly of Scottish blood and that even in the twentieth Scottish
candidates enjoyed a preference. A case in point is that of Mr. Robert
Laurence of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. Born in Lerwick, Shetland, he
applied from Chicago in 1906 in his early teens for a clerkship in the
fur trade and was taken on immediately, sight unseen, subsequently
serving for several years at the post of Matawagamingue in northern
Ontario, before leaving the service to pursue a different career.26

Selecting the names of a few representative Scots
from among all those who contributed so much to the fur trade is a truly
bewildering task. We can do little more here than to mention some of the
most outstanding, adding the caution that these men built on the
achievements of lesser men, both their own countrymen and others, most
of whom never rose to positions of importance in the country and are now
largely forgotten.

The explorers necessarily come first, for without
them there would have been no transcontinental trade. The earliest of
course were French, although the Hudson's Bay Company also sent
emissaries inland at an early date - Henry Kelsey in 1690, Anthony
Henday in 1754-5 and Samuel Hearne in 1771-2. But the exploration
"explosion" only really began after 1763, with the aggressive Montreal
traders pushing into the northwest, and the predominantly Scottish
character of the later North West Company insured Scots an important
role in opening up the country. We should always remember, however, that
without the friendship of the Indians the whole process of exploring the
continent would have been much more arduous and dangerous than it
actually was.

The man who made the most powerful impact on his
contemporaries and more than any other, perhaps, has stirred the
imagination of later generations of Canadians was the Nor'Wester
Alexander Mackenzie, born near Stornoway on the Island of Lewis. In 1789
he reached the Arctic Ocean by the river named after him and four years
later was the first white man to cross overland to the Pacific in the
northern part of the continent. But the fact that he published his
famous Voyages in London in 1801, and a year later received a
knighthood, doubtless contributed much to his reputation in his own day.
His book has reappeared in numerous editions since then, one of the most
recent being Dr. Kaye Lamb's definitive volume of his journals and
letters for the Hakluyt Society, published in 1970. In contrast, Simon
Fraser, the Nor'Wester who in 1808 conquered the turbulent Fraser River by incredible feats of daring
and endurance, was largely neglected in his lifetime and had to wait for
general recognition until 1960, when Dr. Lamb edited his letters and
journals.27 The name of Fraser's redoubtable companion, John
Stuart (born in Strathspey), is commemorated in Stuart Lake, northern
British Columbia, but he seems more often to be remembered, even by
historians, as the uncle of Lord Strathcona.

At the time of the union of 1821 British exploration
was principally concerned with the renewed search for a northwest
passage. The Hudson's Bay Company, besides assisting the official
expeditions at considerable cost to itself, undertook to complete the
survey of the Arctic coastline. To this project two Scottish officers
made the most significant contributions, Thomas Simpson, Master of Arts
of King's College, Aberdeen, and a first cousin of Governor Simpson, and
Dr. John Rae, an Orkney surgeon with an Edinburgh degree.

Simpson shared the command of the 1837-40 expeditions
with an older officer, Peter Warren Dease, who seems to have been
content to let him take the lead, a role for which he was eminently
suited. By the time of his tragic death in 1840 most of the unknown
portion of the coastline had been surveyed and the governor assigned the
task of finishing it to Rae, who was already famous in the service as a
marksman and for his feats of endurance in travelling about the country.

Rae's explorations covered the years 1846-53, during
which he not only completed the survey of the coast but also discovered
the first clues to the fate of Sir John Franklin and his men. His
methods of travel anticipated the modern age of Arctic exploration in
adopting the clothing and living habits of the Indians and Esquimaux
but, in reality, he was only exploiting to the full practices which, in
modified form, had long been in use in the fur trade. He was the first
since Hearne, however, to depend on the food the land provided. The ten
men he chose to accompany him on his first expedition represented a
cross-section of the Company's personnel - four Orkneymen, one
Shetlander, one Hebridean, two French Canadians, a boy from York Factory
and an Indian deer hunter. Like Mackenzie, Rae was knighted for his
services to exploration and his memorial in Stromness Cathedral is a
particularly moving and appropriate one, the life-sized figure of a man
asleep in a buffalo sleeping bag, with his moccasins on, and a gun and
open book at his side.

During these years there were still vast unexplored
areas of what is now Canada, especially in modern Yukon Territory and
the northern parts of Labrador and Quebec. Four Scottish officers shared
largely in opening up the Yukon. In 1834 John McLeod penetrated to the
headwaters of the Stikine River by the hazardous Liard River route. John
Bell established Fort McPherson on the Peel River and explored the
Porcupine to its confluence with the Yukon. Alexander Hunter Murray
built Fort Yukon there in 1847, the Company's most remote post and
actually in Russian territory. Finally, Robert Campbell explored most of
the Liard country between 1838 and 1852 and discovered
the Pelly River (the upper portion of the Yukon), which the Company
would have named for him, had he not modestly refused the honour.

The exploration of much of northern Labrador was the
work of two other Scottish officers, Nicol Finlayson, brother of Duncan
Finlayson, Sir George Simpson's brother-in-law, and John McLean. In
1831, from Moose Factory, Finlayson established Fort Chimo on Ungava
Bay, travelling partly by way of the seacoast and partly overland. Six
years later the governor assigned the Fort Chimo post to McLean,
instructing him to open up communications with Esquimaux Bay (now
Hamilton Inlet) on the Atlantic coast. McLean made a spectacular journey
there and back in 1838 and the following year again travelled inland,
being the first white man to see the Grand Falls of Labrador (later
Hamilton and now Churchill Falls), half as high again as Niagara. At
odds with the governor, McLean left the Company in 1845 after
twenty-five years in the service, and the book he wrote about his
experiences is still a fascinating account, if somewhat marred by his
bitterness against his former employers.28

After the explorers came the administrators, whose
genius transformed the fur trade into Canada's first transcontinental
industry. We have already assessed the contributions of two outstanding
Scots to fur trade affairs during the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. Indeed the names of Simon McTavish and Sir George Simpson are
virtually synonymous today in the popular mind with their respective
companies. In vision and enterprise they were very much alike, but while
one of Simpson's greatest assets was his ability to get along with all
sorts of men, McTavish's basically understanding and generous nature was
embittered by the quarrel with Mackenzie and his supporters, which
darkened the last years of his life and earned him the reputation of the
haughty "Marquis" of the Montreal trade. Simpson's nickname, "the little
Emperor," on the other hand, fitted him perfectly and although he was
not, perhaps, as sympathetic a character as McTavish, he probably
excelled him in optimism and energy, and in the close attention to
detail which turned the disaster of the pre-union period into the
triumph of the united company.

When Simon McTavish died in 1804, his nephew, William
McGillivray, succeeded him as head of the North West Company.
McGillivray appears to have inherited both his uncle's attractive
personal traits and his business ability but, faced with the effects of
the disastrous years of conflict, 1799-1804, and the difficulties raised
by the Red River Settlement, it is unlikely that even a much greater man
could have forestalled the eventual absorption of the Canadian concern
or the failure of the former North West Company agents in 1825.

Two other administrators of Scottish ancestry, Dr.
John McLoughlin (born in Riviere-du-Loup and part Irish) and James
Douglas (born in Demarara, British Guiana), made their names on the west
coast. McLoughlin, as we have seen, was one of the spokesmen for the
rebellious North West wintering partners in 1820, and after the union he
was sent to the Columbia district. A very able, if passionate and
arrogant man, he built an empire which extended as far north as Russian
Alaska but which dissolved rapidly after 1840 with the advance of
American settlement into Oregon. In the end he left the service and
became an American citizen, revered by the settlers as "the Father of
Oregon" or "The White-Headed Eagle."

Douglas replaced McLoughlin as the Company's chief on
the west coast, his headquarters being Fort Victoria, which he himself
had established in 1842 on Vancouver Island. The British government
appointed him Governor of the colony of Vancouver Island in 1851 and he
held this office in conjunction with his chief factorship in the
Hudson's Bay Company but when, seven years later, he became the first
Governor of the new colony of British Columbia, he left the service. He
was knighted in 1863. Alexander Grant Dallas, another Scot, formerly of
Jardine, Matheson & Co. and a newcomer to the Hudson's Bay Company,
succeeded him at Fort Victoria. Dallas married Douglas's youngest
daughter, Amelia, and followed Sir George Simpson as overseas governor
from 1862-4. His successor in that office was Chief Factor William
MacTavish, nephew of Simpson's old friend, John George McTavish, who had
spent his life in the country and was to be the Company's last overseas
governor. The difference in spelling of the surnames is because John
George, second son of the then MacTavish chieftain, had changed his to
accord with that of his patron, Simon McTavish.

Far and away the most successful of them all in terms
of monetary reward and public acclaim was Donald Smith (born in Forres,
Morayshire), who spent most of his fur trade years at the remote North
West River post in Labrador. He was a canny investor and many of his
fellow officers entrusted their funds to him. In 1869 he was appointed
head of the Company's Montreal office and a few months later chief
commissioner to deal with the rebellion at Red River. His real career,
begun in his fifties, was remarkable. Member of Parliament, first in
Manitoba and then at Ottawa, he also made a fortune in railways, later
playing a prominent part in the financing of the Canadian Pacific and
becoming in turn Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company in London,
President of the Bank of Montreal and Canadian High Commissioner in
England. In 1897, after having received several previous honours, he was
raised to the peerage as Baron Strathcona and Mount Royal. His
benefactions, both in Canada and Britain, were legion.

The fur trade also boasted a good many writers within
its ranks, a number of them Scots. Fascinating journals of travel and
exploration are preserved in the Hudson's Bay Archives and the Hudson's
Bay Record Society has already published several, Rae's among them.
Other fur trade letters and diaries have appeared in various forms,
while still other authors have used their experiences either as a basis
for reminiscence, like Isaac Cowie and N.M.W.J. McKenzie, or for
fiction, like Robert M. Ballantyne. A nephew of Sir Walter Scott's
publisher and a clerk in the Company's service from 1841-7, Ballantyne
was a prolific writer and his books of adventure are still popular with
boys. The first of them, Hudson's Bay: or Every-Day Life in the Wilds
of North America, published in 1848, is an account of his years in
the country. Such was the romantic attraction of his stories that Cowie
warned all boys against reading them, declaring that they had lured him,
to his regret, into the service. Let them instead, he advised, "mark and
digest" its realities as revealed by McLean.29

Alexander Ross, who settled in Red River in 1825, was
probably the first of the fur trade historians. A clerk in Astor's
Pacific Fur Company, he had taken part in the founding of Astoria,
subsequently joining the Nor-'Westers, and his three books,
Adventures of the First Settlers on the Oregon or Columbia (1849),
The Fur-Hunters of the Far West (2 vols., 1855) and The Red
River Settlement (1856) are still read by those interested in the
subjects, the last two having been reprinted in the 1950s.30 Another Red River historian was Joseph James Hargrave, son of
Chief Factor James Hargrave and Letitia MacTavish, born at York Factory,
educated at St. Andrew's and Edinburgh universities and secretary to his
uncle, Governor William MacTavish. His book, Red River, was published in
1871. Alexander Hunter Murray contributed notes and drawings on the
Loucheux Indians to Sir John Richardson's Arctic Searching Expedition, 31
while his own Journal of the Yukon, 1847-8, edited
by L.J. Burpee, was published by the Canadian Archives in 1910. Chief
Trader Bernard Ross wrote articles on natural history and gathered
specimens for the Smithsonian Institution, while Chief Factor Roderick
Macfarlane's Notes on Mammals collected and observed in the Northern
Mackenzie River district form a valuable section of Charles Mair's
Through the Mackenzie Basin. 32

Reminiscences or diaries, written by Scots employed
in the Hudson's Bay Company's service, continue to come out and to
attract enthusiastic readers. J.W. Anderson's delightful Fur Trader's
Story (1961)33 deals mostly with the country around James
Bay. Behind the Palisades (1963 )34 is the autobiography of
George Simpson McTavish, great-grandson of Sir George's illegitimate
daughter, Maria, who married Donald McTavish. In Rupert's Land (1970) 35 contains the memoirs of Walter Traill, whose mother
was Catherine Parr Traill and his father a member of a well-known Orkney
family, one of whose ancestors Scott immortalized as Magnus Troil in The
Pirate. In Campbell of the Yukon (1970)36 Clifford Wilson, a
former editor of The Beaver, has brought together the reminiscences and
other records of the valiant and persevering Robert Campbell, discoverer
of the Pelly River.

Many of the fur traders' descendants have long
privately cherished their ties with the trade but their interest in it,
like that of other Canadians, has immeasurably increased in the last
fifty years, during which the achievements of the North West and
Hudson's Bay Companies have at last been accorded their rightful place
in our early history. Now the rebuilding of some of the most famous
posts, among them Grand Portage (in upper Michigan), Lower Fort Garry
and Fort Edmonton, as well as the current reconstruction of Fort
William, is not only helping to bring the fur trade to life for all
Canadians but must surely arouse in those of Scottish origin an even
greater pride in the part played by their forbearers, or fellow
countrymen, in the development of our nation.

NOTES

Although this study is based primarily on secondary
sources and on private papers in her possession, the author is much
indebted to the Governor and Committee of the Hudson's Bay Company for
permission to use their Archives over a period of years, during which,
among other benefits, she came to appreciate the vital role played by
Scots in the success of the Hudson's Bay Company.

5. John Shearer, W. Groundwater, J.D. Mackay, The
New Orkney Book (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1966), pp. 15, 23.
This collection of essays on Orkney and original poems updates The
Orkney Book, published in Edinburgh in 1909, and prepared for use in
the schools of Orkney by a group of young Orcadians resident in
Edinburgh. The Orkney Book has long been out of print and the
present volume was written in the hope that new readers would find
pleasure in the story of Orkney.

6. Rich,
II, pp. 128, 157,
168-9.

7. Rich, I, p. 499.

8. Isaac Cowie, The Company of Adventurers
(Toronto: William Briggs, 1913),p.62.

17. Alexander Henry, Travels and Adventures in
Canada and the Indian Territories Between the Years 1760 and 1776,
James Bain, ed., Introduction to the new edition by L.G. Thomas
(Edmonton: M.G. Hurtig, 1969), p. xii.

26. We may add that Scots did not confine themselves
to the Canadian fur trade but figured prominently in that of the United
States as well, in the early St. Louis trade, in Astor's Pacific Fur
Company, in the American Fur Company and among the ranks of the free
traders.

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